Let There Be Right

C.S. Lewis: Fascinating Storyteller, Repelling Theologian

The Chronicles of Narnia fascinated me at an early age. As such was
my habit with books I enjoyed, I read them through over and over again.
(It was hard to choose, but The Silver Chair was—and is—my
favorite.)

The books appeared to be analogies to Scripture and Christianity. But some
of the teachings perplexed me when I was young—such as the implications
in The Last Battle. Susan was no longer a believer? And a rejector
of Aslan, a Calormene who believed in the false god Tash, went to “Heaven,”
such as Heaven was in the Chronicles?

I also read Out of the Silent Plant, Perelandra, and That Hideous
Strength. They were interesting, but I was not as fond of them as the
Chronicles.

Several years after first reading the Chronicles, I read
Mere Christianity.

Then, the misgivings in childhood hardened into objections to
the teachings in Mere Christianity. For example:

“But if you are a poor creature—poisoned by
a wretched up-bringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies
and senseless quarrels—saddled, by no choice of your own, with some
loathsome sexual perversion—nagged day in and day out by an
inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends—do
not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He
blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive.
Keep on. Do what you can. One day (perhaps in another world, but
perhaps far sooner than that) he will fling it on the scrap-heap and
give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all—not least
yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school. (Some
of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.)”

Let’s go through this one point at a time. “Poisoned
by a wretched upbringing”: Where is Original Sin if you aren’t
poisoned by your own sinful nature — but those wretches who
brought you up poisoned you!

“Saddled, by no choice of your own, with some loathsome
sexual perversion”: More muddying of theological
waters. Lewis is giving his own version of the mantra we hear nowadays in
excuse for sodomy, but this could just as easily apply to any sexual
deviants. Pedophiles, necrophiliacs, sodomites, lesbians, bestiliacs...
He does not acknowledge the difference between having
sexual desires and committing sexual acts. After all, we who
are virgins have sexual desires, but we have not acted
upon them.

But in Lewis’ teaching, sexual
perversion is a discrete thing separate from the actual perverts, who
bear no responsibility for what they are. And he does not
explain where the responsibility for the existence of these “loathsome
sexual perversions” lie, but if God is the creator, then did
God force loathsome sexual perversions upon certain human beings?

“But if you are a poor creature,” “You are one of
the poor whom he blessed”: Lewis uses the term ‘poor’
as to mean ‘unfortunate’—not as in monetary poverty; one
could be a millionaire’s scion and be brought up in a house
full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels. (In fact, the latter
may be more likely in the household of the rich.) Lewis says that
the unfortunate are the ones whom “Jesus blessed,” but
what was the context of Jesus’ statement?

Jesus had said, “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom
of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.
Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.” Luke 6:20b - 21

Hungering and weeping are physical actions and Jesus meant them
in that sense. Given the chronology of His remarks, it is quite
reasonable to take His meaning of poor as materially or physically poor.

“He knows what a wretched machine
you are trying to drive...[O]ne day (perhaps
in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) He will
fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one.” Our bodies
are... machines that go to a...
“scrap-heap”? Did Lewis mean hell or did he mean some
cosmic landfill? And as to giving the person
a “new machine” — Did Lewis trust the teaching in 2 Cor. 5:17,
that if “any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:
old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”?

Worst of all in “The Lord is my shepherd” (23), after the
green pasture, the waters of comfort, the sure confidence in the valley
of the shadow, we suddenly run across (5) “Thou shalt prepare
a table for me against them that trouble me”—or,
as Dr. Moffatt translates it, “Thou art my host, spreading a feast
for me while my enemies have to look on.” The poet’s enjoyment
of his present prosperity would not be complete unless those horrid Joneses
(who used to look down their noses at him) were watching it all and hating it.

“The poet’s enjoyment of his present prosperity would not be
complete...”

Lewis reads more into the text than it presents. The Psalmist
was simply stating a fact that God provided his food for him in the presence
of his enemies. He did not say that his enjoyment of eating food (and why
Lewis implies eating food is exceptional prosperity is beyond me) would
not be complete without his enemies watching. Second, “those horrid
Joneses who used to look down their noses at him”? This mocks David,
by impugning the pettiest of reasons to consider someone his enemy. In reality,
the enemies of David were far from Joneses merely looking down their noses
at him. They were paranoid, crazed men such as King Saul.

Lewis continues,

This may not be so diabolical as the passages I quoted above; but
the pettiness and vulgarity of it, especially in such surroundings, are
hard to endure.

Lewis reads pettiness and vulgarity into the Psalm. And “hard
to endure”—So the 23rd Psalm was hard to endure? I ask, if
Lewis found reading Psalm 23 “hard to endure,” what would
he have called a life bereft of creature comforts, much less an experience
such as Richard Wurmbrand’s fourteen years in Communist jail?

Finally, Lewis writes as if he were on a higher moral and literal plane
than the Psalms.

One way of dealing with these terrible or (dare we say?)
contemptible Psalms is simply to leave them alone.

Note: Reflections of the Psalms was published only four years before
C.S. Lewis died; one cannot excuse C.S. Lewis’ criticism and contempt
for the Psalms as some anomaly early on after he ceased to be an atheist.

Let us return to the problems in the book he called “Mere
Christianity”—but which could almost be called, “Mere
Theism.” After all, Lewis declared therein:

There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about
Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in
a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people
in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to
concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement
with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For
example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more
on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background
(though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain
other points. Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth
may have been in this position.

To claim a man can “belong to Christ
without knowing it [and thus without knowing Christ]” contradicts
Jesus’ declaration, And this is life eternal, that they
might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou
hast sent. John 17:3

What kind of Christ and what kind of God would cause people to believe
in Him without making it clear to those people exactly in Whom they
believed?

What kind of God would give salvation to someone who didn’t
acknowledge the true source of his salvation and attributed his goodness
to some other religious teacher?
Scripture records that Christ told his disciples to preach the
gospel to all nations; but if Christ is willing to extend salvation
to those who never believe in His name or who cling to the teachings of men
such as Buddha, his disciples did not, and do not, need to preach
the Gospel to all nations. After all, Buddhism can lead you to Christ.
Hinduism can get you to Christ.

Lewis also diminishes the value of Christ’s shed blood on the
cross as he asserts,

Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals
have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work—the
bit we could not have done for ourselves”has been done for us. We
have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts;
it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves
open to the one Man in whom it is fully present, and who, in spite of
being God, is also a real man, he will do it in us and for us.
Remember what I said about ‘good infection.’ One of our own
race has this new life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.

Of course, you can express this in all sorts of different ways. You can say
that Christ died for our sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven us
because Christ has done for us what we ought to have done. You may say that
we are washed in the blood of the Lamb. You may say that Christ has defeated
death. They are all true. If any of them do [sic] not appeal to you, leave
it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you do,
do not start quarreling with other people because they use a different
formula from yours.

Salvation, then, is likened to a “good infection,” one
that you can “catch” from Jesus when you get close enough
to Him. Lewis fails to specify how close that close enough must be.

Jesus Himself never spoke of “catching” eternal life; eternal
life was given, not caught.

Lewis also believed man came from animals, only that God guided the process.
In The Problem of Pain, published 1940, he writes:

If by saying that man rose from
brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from
animals, I have no objections. [...]

For long centuries God perfected the
animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image
of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumbs could be applied to each of its
fingers, and jaws and teeth and the throat capable of articulation, and a
brain sufficiently complex to execute all material motions whereby
rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed for ages
in this state before it became man. [...] We do not know how many of
these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal
state.

And if his rejection of Old Testament as factual history could not
be clearer:

The Hebrews, like other peoples,
had mythology: but, as they were the chosen people so their mythology was
the chosen mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle
of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends
in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical. Whether
we can ever say with certainty where, in the process of crystallization, any
particular Old Testament story falls, is another matter. I take it that
the memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and
are scarcely less historical than St. Mark or Acts; and that the Book
of Jonah is at the opposite end. —Miracles, p. 139

Funny that the New Testament recorded Jesus Himself presenting Jonah
as historical truth—in Matthew 12:38-41:

Then certain of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying,
“Master, we would see a sign from thee.” 39 But
He answered and said unto them, “An evil and adulterous generation
seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign
of the prophet Jonah: 40 For as Jonah was three days and three
nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days
and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh
shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because
they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and, behold, a greater than Jonah
is here.

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous,
so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against
it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive
if those for the dead were forbidden.

I believe in Purgatory. Mind you, the Reformers had good reasons
for throwing doubt on the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory as that
Romish doctrine had then become. I don’t mean merely the commercial
scandal. [...] The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s DREAM.
There, if I remember it rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne,
begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer ‘With
its darkness to affront that light’. Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.
Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?

Lewis references no Scripture to substantiate his belief in praying for the
dead, nor for his belief in Purgatory. Indeed, he cites a man’s book, Newman’s
DREAM.

Looking at Scripture, we find no pattern of praying for the dead, nor of
Purgatory. We remember that king David fasted
and prayed for his sick infant son when the son was alive; but after the
son died, he asked his servants to bring him food and made no more supplication
to God for his son (2 Samuel 12:16-23).

We recall that Jesus, in His parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19 - 31),
gives no method for the redeemed to be put into hell nor “cleansing Purgatory”, nor for those in hell to be released
from hell. For He quotes Abraham, “Now he [Lazarus]
is comforted, and thou art tormented; And beside all this, between us and you
there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence
to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.”

We also recall that Jesus told the
repentant thief on the cross, “Today shalt
thou be with Me in paradise”
(Luke 23:43, emphasis added).

Furthermore, when Revelation describes souls in Heaven, we see no soul there
begging to be taken away and cleansed. Believing that a Christian soul
needs to be purified further contradicts 1 John 1:7—that the
blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.

One could cite many more examples of Lewis’ dismissal of Scripture
and rejection of its doctrines, but I will not.

The man who reads Scripture with faith, who day by day turns to it to
sustain and guide him, cannot but find C.S. Lewis’
un-Scriptural theology repulsive.

But since Scripture is unsurpassed in providing peace and joy,
one will also pity the storyteller.
For Lewis denied himself the
comfort, the reassurance, of Scripture by rejecting its authority.

Fascinating Storyteller, Repelling Theologian

Clive Staples Lewis wrote fascinating fiction.
Yet this is the weakness in his theology,
which strays from Scripture...Continue Reading→